Brunner's Existentialism

   If you have been reading this little blog, you will notice that a theme is starting to develop. Or at least a few themes are developing. First of all, everything is problematic. Brunner holds that the majority of Christians have deficient views of who God is, who we are, and how both act in the world. This, however, is only secondary.

   The main theme of Brunner's work is existentialism. You have probably noticed by now that everything is about communion and relationship. For Brunner, this is the key to the entirety of Revelation. Without focusing on relationship and it's aspects, we lose the meaning of the Revelation.

   I thought I'd take a second and post what James W. Sire (in The Universe Next Door: A Basic Worldview Catalogue) says about Existential Theism, which Brunner seems to follow pretty closely. In Sire's book, he says that Existential Theism is all about personalizing theology, and trying to correct a perceived error of traditional religion that is de-personal.

   For traditional theism, sin is breaking a rule, repentance is admitting guilt, forgiveness is canceling a penalty, faith is believing a set of propositions and the Christian life is about obeying rules. In contrast, Existential theism states that sin is betraying a relationship, repentance is sorrowing over personal betrayal, forgiveness is renewing fellowship, faith is committing oneself to a person, and the Christian Life is about pleasing the Lord, who is a Person. (pg. 131)

  The main traits of existential theism are that: "1. Human beings are personal beings, who, when they come to full consciousness, find themselves in an alien universe; whether or not God exists is a tough question to be solved not by reason but by faith." (pg. 128) "2 The personal is valuable" (pg. 129) "3. Knowledge is subjectivity, the whole truth is often paradoxical" (pg. 132) "4. History as a record of events is uncertain and unimportant, but history as a model or type of myth to be made present and lived is of supreme importance." (pg. 135) 


   In reading my commentary on Brunner's work, I think that all of these are highlighted, especially the first three. I am not saying that this is the way to believe, I am just trying to shed some more light on the background on Brunner's work. Brunner is largely indebted to the Christian Existentialist Kierkegaard who tried to combat dead theism and dead orthodoxy. In doing so, Kierkegaard changed the focus of Christianity from "sheer morality" (Sire, pg. 139) taking it on a "subjectivist turn" trying to lift "religion from history" and focus it "on inner meaning." (Sire, 139)  This is Brunner's project: to take Christianity out of the sphere of history and reason and to personalize it, to make it focus on relationship instead of proofs. Even though he might go over-board sometimes in his existentialism, I think we can and should learn from some of his teachings.

 

The Problem of God's Will

   "For I know the plans that I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for welfare and not calamity to give you a future and a hope." (Jer. 29:11, NASB) These are the words of the prophet of Jeremiah which have lead many Christians astray towards a false view of the future. From this passage, I heard many people claim that God had a personal blueprint of their lives drawn up, and that they were following the blueprint. Yet, this is a  perverted view of the Scriptures. John Calvin, in his Commentary on Jeremiah (http://www.ccel.org/ccel/calvin/calcom19.xii.xi.html) makes this commonly held view look ridiculous. He states that  "He therefore says, I know the thoughts which I think towards you Some think that God claims here, as what peculiarly belongs to him, the foreknowledge of future things; but this is foreign to the Prophet’s meaning. There is here, on the contrary, an implied contrast between the certain counsel of God, and the vain imaginations in which the Jews indulged themselves. The same thing is meant when Isaiah says,

“As far as the heavens are from the earth, so far are my thoughts from your thoughts,” (Isaiah 55:9)

for they were wont absurdly to measure God by their own ideas. When anything was promised, they reasoned about its validity, and looked on all surrounding circumstances; and thus they consulted only their own brains. Hence God reproved them, and shewed how preposterously they acted, and said, that his thoughts were as remote from their thoughts as heaven is from the earth. So also in this place, though the two parts are not here expressed; the Prophet’s object was no other than to shew, that the Jews ought to have surrendered themselves to God, and not to seek to be so acute as to understand how this or that would be done, but to feel convinced that what God had decreed could not be changed." (http://www.ccel.org/ccel/calvin/calcom19.xii.xi.html)

  With Calvin's view in mind, that we are wont to understand God's will, and in doing so, project our thoughts onto Him, and try to change His decrees into our decrees, we must examine more in depth the problem of us trying to comprehend God's Will.

The problem with understanding God's Will for us is that it is so simple. Too simplistic for us to fully grasp. We want something more, something more in depth, something that sounds more in line with our thoughts, our plans, our actions. For, according to St. Augustine, following the will of God is the toughest easy thing we can ever do. In his In epistulam Ioannis ad Parthos, "dilige et quod vis fac". Love God and do what you will. It's that easy, yet that hard.

Brunner extrapolates on this, saying: "It is not the will of God that I should "do" something, but He wills that I should love Hi with my whole heart, and in so doing also love my neighbour as myself/" (pg. 223) We want to use the Will of God as instructions, telling us what to do at every turning point and for every decision. Thankfully, and frustratingly, this is not so. The Holy Scripture is not a guidebook to life, it does not tell us the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything Else. ( For that, see Douglas Adam's classic Nihilistic Text, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) "Love never says what we are to do; it does not the Good Samaritan what he ought to do for the poor man who fell among robbers. All it says is this: Here and now do do everything you ca do for him!" (pg. 225) We are not told how to live our lives in detail. We are told to go out and love both God and neighbor. This is the most basic formulation of God' will. Again, "God does not will "something"; He wants "me for Himself"." (pg. 223) God does not need our actions, but wants our communion with Him. 

This communion, is not a command. For "One who is filled with the love of God does not need to be commanded to love God....The Commandment of Love, since it emphasizes the whole meaning of all the commandments, eliminates itself as commandment. Love can only be present where it is given, not where it is commanded." (pg. 224)  Since we are given Love, we should respond in Love. This is the Christian Faith in essence. Loving God and doing what we will to show and share that love. 

The (non) Problem of Evil

  "And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose." (Rom. 8:28) In this statement the Apostle Paul makes the modern reader ask a question: If I love God, then why do I suffer? We seek the answer in what the scholars term theodicy, that is the Justification of God (See http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/14569a.htm). How could a Good God allow me to suffer is the key question in this line of thought (As shown in Rabbi Kushner's work When Bad Things Happen to Good People). If God is Good, and if I love Him, why do I suffer?

  Yet, we have to object to this question on two fronts. Is God good? And then we have to call into question Rabbi Kushner's thesis that there is such a thing as a good person. We want to believe that God is good instead of believing that God is Just. Due to our misunderstanding, we ask a question that cannot be asked.

  "The theologian can support this view (that the line of questioning is invalid) by two facts; first, the human arrogance implied in the very idea of a theodicy - the attempt to "justify the ways of God to man" - and secondly, the fact that the question is never explicitly raised in the New Testament." (pg. 176-177) Brunner continues his thought, saying that "those who really believe in Jesus Christ, this question of theodicy cannot be raised." (pg. 177)  We shall focus, for the sake of this post, to focus on the first point, that the question of why does evil exist is solely based on human arrogance and pride, and not on Biblical foundations.

   We believe, in our arrogance and piety, that if we love God we will no longer have to suffer. If God loves us, and is a God of Love, then why does He allow us, His faithful to suffer? In asking this, we negate the central message of the Christian Narrative. We negate the Cross. Let me explain through Brunner. "If Jesus the Son of God was crucified, owing to the most terrible miscarriage of justice and judicial murder in the history of the world, as a sacrifice to the most incredible blindness and malice, can any of His disciples expect to receive a guarantee that nothing of that kind will happen to him?" (pg. 158)  In our perverted sense of self-worth, we answer this question with a resounding Yes! Christ had to suffer, yet I do not have to. We want the disciple to be above his Lord. (pg. 158) We understand that Christ had to suffer, but we expect  God, in His Death, "to remove all difficulties and constantly" turn "everything into good." (pg. 158) Our pride, sadly does not stop there. We have "the arrogance that God "ought" to allow Himself to be measured by our standard of justice." (pg. 184) The long and short of it is that we want to be in a special position, where we need not suffer.

    Yet, "The Good Shepherd does permit His sheep to go through the Dark Valley." (pg. 158) Why? Not because He is a Good God, but due to His nature; due to His being a Just God. Evil "is the product of apostasy from God, of the perversion of the divine order of Creation. It is the product of the misused gift of human freedom." (pg. 181) Evil is a result of the great No that human answers God with. It is not because God is cruel that there is evil. It is because we are cruel.

  It is then not up to us to solve the problem. It is "here, in the centre of the revelation, the problem of theodicy is solved, but not in theory (as in those theories of the philosophers and the theologians), but "existentially", and practically. (pg. 182) (When we try solve the problem, we create more. Our trying to understand through theory continues our rejection and rebellion from God.)  It is in the Cross that the problem of evil is solved. It is God breaking through to us, revealing Himself to us, and subjecting Himself to "death, even death on a cross" (Philippians 2:8) Brunner continues, "we stand before the Cross...not as innocent or neutral spectators, who gaze with horror into an obyss outside themselves which appears with the world, with all its injustice and pain, but we ourselves stand in the midst of the abyss." (pg. 182) Going back a little bit, we want to view ourselves as Good People, in Rabbi Kushner's words. we want to thing that we are either innocent or neutral and that we play no role in the Cross. This is a false view taken from a prideful stance. We are the one's that made God undertake an "opus alienum", a strange work that is alien to who He is.

  The problem of evil cannot have an answer. It is mysterious to us, because we do not want to admit culpability in it. We want to "make God responsible for something that men do." (pg. 177) The friends of Job tried in vain to answer the question of why Job is suffering, but those answers, those "smooth solutions...seemed to (Job) to be futile excuses." (pg. 178) There are no smooth solutions, and the only "solution" is the Cross of Christ.

   It is here, at the Cross that "it becomes evident that evil is that which God does not will, and does not do, and at the same time, that God has such power over this evil, which He does not will, that He is able to perceive the unity of the mercy, the righteousness...of God. At this point is granted to us to have a glimpse into the mystery of the divine government of the world; the impenetrable darkness which otherwise lies upon it, is lifted like a curtain before our eyes. As soon as we look away from the Cross and try to explain world history ourselves in theological terms, the curtain falls once more, and we are left gazing into impenetrable darkness." (pg. 182) It is only through the Cross that "the real solution of the problem of theodicy" is revealed. And that solution is redemption.

  

   We then need to change the question. The question is now: Why do we reject God and create Evil?
 

Existence-in-Relaton

  Brunner has, through his exegesis of the problem of sin, begun to define what humanity is. His basic argument is that we are "existence-in-relation" and that without relation, we do not have existence. He defends this by saying that "The fact that man has been created by God means that his whole existence is determined by his relation to God,, His existence, as we have seen, is that of a "subject-in-relation", or responsible existence." (pg. 118) Our existence is not only relationally qualified to each other, but to God. If we do not have a relationship with both, we no longer (truly) exist.

   Our relationship to God goes in "two directions. this relation of man to God is based on freedom; first of all, the freedom of the generous love of God, which calls man to love Him in return and in so doing calls him to communion with Himself; secondly the freedom of man, who has to respond to this call (the call of Creation to join in communion with God). (pg. 118)

   We have the freedom to reject this call, which we discussed in the last post. When we reject the call of God, we find ourselves not outside of relation to God, but in relation of a different sort. "To the sinful man God is present as the Holy God, who allows the disobedient man to feel His resistance...Instead of God attracting man (calling man into relationship), he now repels him; this is the negative form of the original love of God." (pg. 118)  


  By "eating of the tree of knowledge and of life, the infringement of the divine preserve, is the effort to achieve autonomy, to be entirely self-centered; it means exchanging the a Deo esse for an impossible a se esse. If man had not yielded to this temptation, he would have lived in communion with God; he would have received life as a gift; daily he would have received it as a gift at the hands of God." (pg. 120) By entering into sin, we have exchanged the essence from God for an unachievable essence from ourselves. Instead of getting the gift of life from God, we try to create for ourselves a life; an ultimately futile project.

   Brunner holds that this 'exchange' of essences is futile. He states "No moral or religious effort will enable us to break through this barrier of the non posse non peccare (non-possibility to not sin). This is the true meaning of the servum arbitrium (sentence of slavery)." (pg. 122) Our natures have turned from liberum arbitrium (sentence of freedom) to the servum arbitrium (sentence of slavery). However, it is not God that enslaves us, but (according to Brunner) we enslave ourselves. We try to find a way to sin no more outside of the Love of God, and instead chain ourselves up in moral and religious systems.

  In our attitude of enslavement, we try to revolt, but not against ourselves. Instead of realizing that we are "the divided self" of Platonism and Neoplatonism or that we are "the sick soul" of psychology, we think that  we need to revolt against God, which in turn means revolting against ourselves. "The sinner is in revolt within himself -that is is his chronic disease, whether he knows it or not, whether he is conscious of the contradiction or not. Sin is being divided not merely from God but also...within himself." (pg. 124) We have not only given up God in our sin, but we have also given up ourselves.

   After the first sin, we are caught up in a dialect: the grandeur et misére de l'homme." (126) Humanity retains the created grandeur but has to it misery added. When we sin, when we sinned, we were left with a trace of our grandeur, but became miserable. The knowledge of our lost relation with God brings us to a three-fold misery: First there is the misery that drives man to despair in which "man cannot help misunderstanding himself and his relation to God." (pg. 126) 

   Secondly, is the phenomenon that St. Augustine speaks of in his famous words: "Cor meum inquietum donec requiescat in Te, domine." (quoted on pg. 127) We have an unquiet heart that is seeking rest in vain outside of God. This unquiet heart is "home-sickness...the pain of banishment, as the result of alienation from God." (pg. 127) We long to be at home, but are not, cannot be, without proper relationship with God and the rest of humanity being restored. (For more on this, see the essay "The Unsettling of America" or "People, Land and Community" in Wendell Berry's The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry)


  Thirdly, we have a "bad conscience". This bad conscience is the deep feeling of guilt and complete, total failure at relationship with God and Man. "It makes aware of the contrast between what we are and what we ought to be. It fills the whole of life with a certain pervading melancholy." (pg. 128) It is not that depression is a result of sin. What Brunner is saying here, through the existentialist (especially Sartre) is that our existence is now filled with a sense of un-fulfillment that is deep rooted. "It is a sign of the wrong relation between what we actually are and that for which we have been made, between the actuality and the possibility of our human nature." (pg. 128)

  Due to despairing un-quieted heart that fills us with guilt, "we cannot bear to be alone, that we shrink from solitude, it produces that profound ennui which Pascal describes so wonderfully with all its effects. It is not fear but Angst" that shows us "that we live under the wrath of God, until the conciling love of God is revealed to us." (pg. 128) We try to distract ourselves from this condition, but it fails. "Man invents all kinds of modifications of the truth, which tend to obscure it; he is very good at at making excuses, and even at shutting his eyes completely. Above all, man is a past master at silencing the voice(s)" of guilt, despair, and un-quietness. We fill our lives with distractions, evasions, and escapes, yet these all continue to plague us. No matter what we do, we cannot silence the voices. Only the Redemptive Love of Christ putting us in right relation with Himself can do that. Everything else is meaningless and vanity, a toiling under the sun. 

The Problem of Humanity

  The problem of humanity is that we are invited or called to worship God. There is no demand in Jesus Christ to worship Him. It is problematic for us that "this call of God...is to be understood in the light of Jesus Christ, not as a purely categorical imperative or a moral law, but as the call of God to communion with Him the Creator, and through Him to communion with" (pg. 73) the rest of humanity. The invitation to worship God through His Revelation would be much easier for us to accept if it was not a call at all.

   If God issued forth a categorical imperative instead of a hypothetical imperative, we would have no choice but to worship. For a categorical imperative is something that we have to do. It is an ontological ought (to continue in the language of Kant), a command that is innate in the core of our being that we have to follow. This would take away our choice, which we would protest, but at the same time, get rid of many difficulties.

   God's hypothetical imperative tells us that we should worship Him, not that we have (ought) to worship. The hypotheticalness of it tells us that it is up to us to decide how to answer. It places the responsibility on us, not on God. We would much rather be free of such responsibility than to have it. It is a burden that sometimes feels to heavy for us.

    We then, after hearing the call, have to respond. We can respond with a Yes and join in with communion with God (and thus the rest of the created order) OR we can respond with a No and reject community in favor of solitude. ( However, "this Either-Or", this Yes or No, "is not that of divine Creation; it is only as a result of the wrong answer, which is the result of sin, that this "Either-or" confronts us as an alternative." (pg. 73) When the individual answers No, he or she creates the Either-Or situation.Our freedom is not to choose, but it is a freedom to be "in the love God, which fills his whole life." (pg. 73) )

  Yet when we answer No to the call, we are not just answering No to God. We are answering No to ourselves. For " the true existence...can only be completed in the answering act of man." (pg. 73) When we deny the invitation to community and choose solitude, we also choose to be incomplete, to have an ontological lack (to use the language of St. Augustine). True human existence is only "existence-in-love" (pg. 73) and when we reject love, we reject true existence and become inauthentic, incomplete. "When man decides against this divine destiny he is in opposition, not only to an ideal destiny, but also to his own nature, and this self-contradiction is now within himself." (pg. 73)


   When humanity answers no, there is "a change in man's relation to God; it is the break in communion with God, due to distrust and defiance." (pg. 92) Out of this distrust and defiance, it is revealed that "the fundamental cause for this breach in communion" is humanity's "desire to be "as God". Man wants to be on level with God, and in doing so to become independent of Him." (pg. 92) However, we do not realize the mistake in breaking off relation with God. "Man's divine destiny means being "like God". freedom. Man is intended to be free, to be like God; but now man wants to have both apart from dependence upon God." (pg. 92) We were created to be free, but to be free in community, not in the solitude that we continually create.

   "Sin", for Brunner, "is throwing off restraint, denial of responsibility hence emancipation from that which makes us responsible, in whose Word we have both our freedom and our bondage. Sin is the desire for the autonom of man, therefore, in the last resort, it is the denial of God and self-deification; it is getting rid of the Lord God, and the proclamation of self-sovereignty." (pg. 93)


   This has been the Modern philosophical project, to assert that Man is autonomous, a law unto itself, and that we can throw off the shackles of anything that limits us. The desire to be autonomous is the desire to be God.
 

The Desire to Be God

     "The best way to conceive of the fundamental project of human reality is to say that man is the being whose project is to be God." (Essays In Existentialism, pg. 70) With this statement, Jean-Paul Sartre sets forth an essential truth. We, as humans, are trying not to encounter God, but to become God. We are not satisfied with being a creature, we want to be the Creator. We do not to have our being granted to us, we want to have être-en-soi or being-in-itself. 

    Even though we as Christians want to counter Sartre, he is on to something. Brunner states that creatureliness bring with it a "sense of weakness, of transience, of nothingness" (pg. 53) that we want to reject. We want to be strong, fixed, and something, yet our creatureliness shows that we are not. He continues to say, "This knowledge of, and this recognition of, our creatureliness is not something we can take for granted." (pg. 54) Once we take our creatureliness for granted, we lose how we are. We are not God, yet, we desperately want to be. (Thus we take our creatureliness for granted.)

  He continues by saying that "The more man is able to distinguish himself from the rest of creation, the more he becomes conscious of himself as subject as an 'I', to whom the whole world is Object, the more does he tend to confuse himself with God, to confuse his spirit with the Spirit of God." (pg. 54) And the more he confuses himself with God, the more he desires to be God. When we see ourselves as at the top of the Great Chain of Being (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_chain_of_being), we start to try to continue climbing the ladder until we are at the very top. 

   We may be tempted to say that we do not desire to be God. Yet, "only the man who has not yet become aware of his nature as a spiritual being, who still regards himself as one object among many others, who thinks it is easy to reject the temptation to become like God." (pg. 54) If we do not take our creatureliness seriously, not only do we not want to be God, but we do not want to become like God. We would rather be impersonal objects than personal subjects. 

Lastly on this subject, Brunner cautions us that "where man thinks God by his own efforts and does not meet the God who reals Himself, in the last resort cannot help" to have this desire to be God. (pg. 54) If we only think about God, we not only limit God, but we become God. If we do not encounter God, we only encounter ourselves. "It is only the encounter with the Living God which eliminates this error." (pg. 54) On top of this, it is only as a creature that we can met the Living God. Otherwise, we desire not only to be God, but to kill him. 

The Problem of Creation

  According to Dr. Brunner, we fall easily into error when we try to start talking about Creation from the Old Testament. This happens because we do not know how to read the Creation account of Genesis 1-2. When the modern reader looks at this text, we become confused. Why does it start out with a puzzling narrative about a 6 day creation culminating in a Sabbath? Why does it not speak of the origin of the Creator? Why is not compatible with our enlightened (through Science) view of the origins of the world?

  Brunner suggest that instead of reading "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth" (Gen. 1:1) we  should instead start by reading "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the word was God." (John 1:1) When we start with Genesis, we start with an unknown God. this God could be "the Theos of Plato or Epictetus, the Rama of the Sikhs, or the Ahura Mazda of Zoroastrianism." (pg. 6) Yet, if we start with John 1, we start with a Revealed God, a God that is uniquely Christian.

    "Unfortunately", according to Brunner, "the uniqueness of this Christian doctrine of Creation and the Creator is continually being obscured by the fact that theologians (and us non-theologians) are so reluctant to begin their work with the New Testament; when they want to deal with the Creation they tend to begin with the Old Testament." (pg. 6) When we start with the Old Testament, we start with The Hidden God, but when we start with the New Testament, we start with the Revealed and Veiled God.

  By starting with the Revealed God, we no longer can turn Creation into Science. We are forced to admit that Creation is not about Cosmology, not about the origin of the World, but the beginning of the Revealed Word. "The magnificent presentation of the creatio ex nihilo, or -and it is the same thing - Creation by the Word" shows us that "The Creation is because God wills it; it has no other foundation...the Creation is the work of...His Holy Love." (pg. 13)

  Instead of a "polytheistic-mythical origin" found in Genesis, we find an origin that starts with the Revelation of the Word of God. Instead of a narrative about the origins of the Cosmos found in Genesis, we find a narrative about the origin of the relationship between God and His Creation in John.

The Problem of Religion

  Christianity, at its heart, is not a religion. Christianity, at its core, is not about doctrine or dogma. Yet, we have made it to be so. We have been led astray to think that Christianity is about following rules, being moral, and being a good person. Yet, this could not be further from the truth! We have been swindled out of our faith, replacing an encounter with God with an encounter with morality.

    Brunner opens his second work on Christian Doctrine (Dogmatics: Volume II - Christian Doctrine of Creation & Redemption (Library of Theological Translations) (v. 2) saying that, "Those memebers of the Church who passively accept what they have been taught as 'revealed truth' seem to be unaware of the fact that their view of 'faith' is hampered by an age-long tradition which has misunderstood the meaning of 'faith', regarding it not as 'encounter' with the Living Christ, but as the acceptance of 'revealed truths'." (pg. vi) 


   With this damning statement, Brunner makes us wonder what has gone wrong. Why are we content to no longer encounter God? We have exchanged "the personal encounter with Christ" for "rigidity and ethical sterility" (pg. vi) This part of Brunner's answer why we no longer seek an encounter with God. We, in our quest for certainty, left the unstable realm of relationship for the stable realm of Reason and thought. We want to know, not to experience, Christ.

   We have lost sight of the creational decree that God is "being-for-us" and that "it is because He wills to communicate Himself....the world exists." (pg. 4) God did not create to come into Being (the Greeks thought that God and the World were correlated so that one could not exist without the other, just as right and left) nor did He create in order to be thought. God created in order to establish a relationship with us.

   And not just any relationship. God did not create an "it", an object for Him to manipulate and control. God created a 'Thou", a subject that could enter into communication and relationship with Him. Yet, we have decided to treat God as an "It", something to be studied, to be figured out, to dissect, to critique and to analyze.

   By doing this, humanity was left to its own devices, trying to figure out who this "It" is. And as Brunner says, "It is no accident that when man is thrown back upon his own methods of acquiring knowledge, he knows nothing of such a 'decree of creation', the history of philosophy...is silent on this point." (pg. 4) No amount of speculative or abstract thought can turn this "It" back into an "I". 

   Before we elucidate this more, we need to understand Creation. For it is here, "at the point where all Christian faith arises, namely in the revelation of God in Jesus Christ." It is by Creation, God, through Jesus Christ reveals Himself to us, and invites us into relationship with Him. "Faith in God the Creator is 'truth-as-encounter'." (pg. 8), not faith in merely truth. For in truth, we can only know, but we cannot experience. we can only perceive, not receive.

   Thus, Creation is the start of not a truth but of a narrative, of a story of God and the World. It is not the beginning of a scientific understanding of the origins of the cosmos, but a "personal summons; it is not a truth which is the fruit of reflection; hence it is truth which, from the very outset, makes me directly responsible." (pg. 8-9) Brunner warns us here that it is not "that I start from the idea that God is the Creator of the world, and then argue that since I also form part of the world I also recognize Him as my Creator, and then come to the conclusion that I belong to God." (pg. 9) It is indeed, the very opposite. The relationship comes first, and then we can speak of God as our Creator. It is from this start, a relational belonging, that we can begin to understand the cosmos and its Creator.

The Problem of Logic

    "Only the renunciation of the logically satisfying theory creates room for true decision; but the Gospel is the Word which confronts us with the summons to decision" (pg. 353), so ends the first book of Brunner's trilogy on Christian Doctrine. In this statement, Dr. Brunner sums up his whole project by revealing two truths.

   The first truth is that to make sense of the Biblical narrative and the Divine, we need to renounce that which is logically satisfying. We need to understand that God is not the God of the philosophers (logicians, academics, or scientists), but the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob (as Blaise Pascal so eloquently put it). God is not knowable through Reason, but through living with Him. We do a dis-service to the Divine when we erect a system of thought and then try to fit God into it. We need to remember Brunner's earlier warning that "the truly personal God is He who is not known through thought" (pg. 123) and that "Wherever dogmatics becomes a system, or is systematically dominated by a fundamental idea then already there has been a fatal declension from the attitude of the faithful translator. The very thing that makes such an impression, and attracts people with good brains: rigid unity of thought, in dogmatics is the infallible sign of error. Revelation cannot be summed up in a system." (pg. 72) We worship a God that cannot be summed up in system. This is a powerful statement. We wish to categorize God and place on Him our logic and control Him. Faith might not be logically satisfying, but it satisfies live.


    The second truth in this statement is that the Gospel confronts us with a decision. We are not Elect from the beginning of time. Our lives are not determined by God. Out of His Love, God limited Himself by creating us and giving us the freedom to choose. In Jesus Christ, in His death, burial, descent and resurrection we are not automatically saved or damned. We are elect through Christ, but not by Christ. (see previous post, (http://lentenhope.blogspot.com/2011/03/elect.html) God, in His Freedom, has given us freedom. We are called to worship, not demanded to worship.

   "To the Elect (those who believe) it is said: "come, ye blessed of My Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world" (pg. 327). It is with this invitation we can come to the celebration, the inauguration of the Kingdom of God. The call has gone out, but many will not hear it. This is what Brunner is trying to get us to think about. We are called to freedom, called out of bondage, but instead of slipping loose the chains and leaving them behind, we try then to use the chains to bind God.

  

The Elect

   "All is Meaningless!" says the Preacher in Ecclesiastes. "The whole history of humanity is a mere nothing, which is swallowed up in the whirlpool of the temporal." (pg. 304) say s Brunner. Because we are finite, we are have no meaning in and of ourselves. We have tried to create meaning, but that has accounted to be meaningless. The sons of Lamech in Genesis 4 tried to fill this void by creating music, history, and war, but this lead not to meaning. For God looked at what He had created, this finite being trying to fill the void, and declared, "I am sorry that I have made them." (Genesis 6:7) By trying to create meaning on our own, we grieved the heart of God and "The Lord was sorry that He had made man on the earth" (Genesis 6:6), for man in his quest for meaning had turned from Him and tried to replace Him.

   Instead of plumbing the depths of the Infinite, Humanity was content to have "his life played out on the surface of the finite." (pg. 304) We have left "the firm foundation in our eternal Origin, and without the firm goal in the eternity at the end of theages, man literally lives 'for the day'."(pg. 304) Carpe Deim has become our motto, forgetting who we were created to be. For humanity is eschatological, not ontological or metaphysical. We are called not to live for the finite, but to live for the Infinite.

    We have elected to live outside of Christ, content to be outside of not only Love, but to be outside of Life. "Whoever excludes himself, is excluded; he who does not allow himself to be included, is not included. But he who allows himself to be included, he who believes, is elect." (pg. 320) When we choose, in our arrogance, not to believe, not love as Christ first loved us, we choose not to participate in or accept the Divine Gift, which is the Life and Love of Christ. We all know John 3:16, the statement that "God so loved the world that He gave His only Son." but we choose to ignore the love poured out on us.

   It is not the work of the Cross to elect us, to choose us, to be saved. For it is "In Him, through Him, but not by Him" (pg. 314) we come to salvation. It is only in Christ, through Christ, that we can find salvation and be saved from from our meaningless existence, according to Brunner. Brunner continues to say that "it is this revealed eternity alone, through which, and in which, I, this individual human being, this individual person, receive eternal meaning, and my individual personal existence is taken seriously." (pg. 305)


   While Dr. Brunner is right that it is only after finding the revealed eternal meaning, Christ, that we can take personal existence meaningful, we do so at the risk of of forgetting the lessons of Ecclesiastes. We live a live that is marked by the curse to toil under the sun, and to labor all of our days to find meaning, only to come up empty. "For to a person who is good in His sight He has given wisdom and knowledge and joy, while to the sinner He has given the task of gathering and collecting so that he may give to one who is good in God's sight. This too is vanity and striving after the wind." (Ecclesiastes 2:26, NASB) Even after we have been given the gift of wisdom and knowledge, the Gift of Christ, we still toil and look for meaning, which is a striving after the wind. We seek meaning for ourselves, it is our lot in this world of vanity and meaninglessness.

   We need to take both sides seriously. We need to understand that God has given us meaning in the Person and Work of Jesus Christ. To add to this, we need to look at the paradoxes that Luther posited. We are both "simultaneously cursed and blessed (simul maledictus et benedictus, simultaneously living and dead (simul vivus et mortus), simultaneously grieving and joyful (simul dolens et gaudens...simultaneously just and a sinner (simul justus et peccator)." (Luther's Theology II, quoted in Hans Urs von Balthasar's Mysterium Paschale) In the same way we can say that we are both just and a sinner, we can say that we  participate in the Eternal meaning given to us by the Revelation of Christ. Yet, we need to keep in mind that we are simul infinitus et finitus, simultaneously finite and infinite, simultaneously meaningful and meaningless.

 

The Repentant God

 The Christian God is not unchanging. He is not a God that looks at the world with disinterest, like the God of Deism. He is affected by what happens to us, His creatures. God "does care what happens to men and women - He is concerned about the changes upon earth. he alters His behaviour in accordance with the changes in men." (pg. 268) To say that God changes at the beginning sounds like heresy at best and blasphemy at worst. But the opposite is true. If God did not change, at least in behaviour, he would be a cruel God that was not Loving or Merciful. God, to be loving, has to change.

"God 'reacts', He changes. God says: "I will not cause my countenance to fall upon you." He "hideth His Face", H withdraws Himself- and again: He draws near, He discloses Himself, He "makes His face to shine upon thee"." (pg. 268) In this quote, Brunner reminds us that the Divine Activities are full of actions that constitute change. God is not a passive God, but an active God, reacting and changing.

This doctrine is easy to grasp once getting over the initial shock. However, it entails a statement that is much more troubling. "God repented Himself". (Amos 7:3, Jer. 42:10, I Sam 15:11) "Behind this expression 'God repented Himself', there lies, in point of fact, nothing less than the fundamental Biblical idea of the relation between God and the world." (pg. 269) This fundamental idea is that God has willed the independence of those that He created, and then enters into the world His creatures have created. By entering the world not created by Him, He limits Himself and behaves according "to the behaviour of man." (pg. 269) This idea might raise hostility, if we are still operating under the understanding that God is potestas absoluta, the Absolute Power that cannot change and cannot be limited. Yet, in His Love, God limits Himself, which causes Him, in His Mercy to repent of Himself.

Brunner continues to say, "If the expression 'God repented Himself' arouses hostility, then on the other hand, the assurance that God hears prayer shows the significance of this hostility very clearly."(pg. 269) We want a God that has the absolute power to change everything when we petition in Him in prayer, yet at the same time, we do not want a God that can change. This is not a paradox, but a blatant contradiction. For both the God who hears prayer and the God who repents is the God that "is interested in what happens upon earth." (pg. 269)

God is not Omnipotent

    Growing up, I learned early on that God was a collection of "Omni"'s: Omnipotent, Omnipresent, Omniscience, and so for. Sadly, this is not true. At least, it is not true in the way that we think about them. God, as we have been discussing is Holy and God is Love. For God to be Omnipotent, He could not be other.

  As we have seen, it is easy to slip into error when speaking of the Divine. For God is mystery, and we want to solve mysteries. One way to solve the mystery of God is offered to use by Dionysius the Areopagite. He defines the "via eminentiae", a way "that consists in moving from the creaturely analogy, by a process of gradual ascent, to the Infinite, to positive statements about the Attributes of God." (pg. 245) We can then move up, gradually, from the lowly to the highest forms. A relevant example of this is the proof: "Man is mighty, the angels are mightier, God is Almighty." (pg. 245) If we understand that there is something mightier than us, then we can move up in degrees until we can say that God is that way. This way is highly problematic, and is one of the ways that lead us to formulate that God is omnipotent.

   However, "the Biblical conception (of God's power) means God's power is over the whole universe; but omnipotentia means the abstract idea that 'God can do everything'." (pg. 248) It is from this conception, that God can do all things that all the silly questions arise. We jokingly ask if God can make a rock so big that He cannot lift it or if God can make the past never happen. This is not only a misunderstanding of Go'd's power, but it is a misunderstanding of who God is.

  If God is Omnipotent, then God would have to be understood as potstas absoluta, or as the absolute power. "This idea swallows up all craturely independence. God, the Almighty, becomes the One who alone is the Sole Reality, and this means Pantheism or Theopanism."(pg. 249) If God was the absolute power, we as creatures would have no power, and thus we would have no freedom. In fact, it goes further than that. If God was All-Powerful, He would be All, for He would be the Sole Reality.

  The argument here contains two lines of thought. The first is "that the entire system of Nature, comprehending all times and spaces, is founded upon divine causality, which, as eternal and omnipresent, is in contrast to all finite causality." (pg. 249-250) This first line of thought says, If God is the cause of all, then we could not cause anything. The second line of thought is as follows: "as affirmed in our feeling of absolute dependence, is completely presented in the totality of finite being, and consequently everything for which there is a causality in God happens and becomes real." (pg. 250) By presenting these thoughts, the German theologian Schleierrmacher says that we feel dependent on God because He is the cause of everything, and that we as finite creatures cannot cause anything. We then have to wonder, what are we here for? If we have no power and are caught up in the cause and effect cycle set in motion by God, why does anything but God exist?

If God, however is not Omnipotent, what is He? We are not trying to argue here that God is not Mighty, that He is not Powerful. What is being said is that God wills to be limited in His power. "God limits Himself by creating something which is not Himself, something over against Himself, which he endows with a relative independence." (pg. 251) By creating something that is not Himself, He needed to limit Himself, "in order that a creature may have room alongside of Himself, in whom and to whom he can reveal and impart Himself." (pg. 251)


  The only power that can love is the sublime power of the self-limiting God. "He wins our hearts through His condescension in his Son, in the Cross of the Son."( pg. 254) The real showing of God's limited power is in the giving of Himself on the cross. If God was Omnipotent, He could have saved the world through any way, but because He limited Himself, He showed his power "in highest sovereignty where the impotence of the Crucified, the defeat of the Son of God, must accomplish the work of revelation and reconciliation." (pg. 253) God's refusal to be Omnipotent is shown to us at the beginning, when He gave of Himself and created, and is continually shown in the revelation of the Crucified.
 

Mysterium Majestatis et Caritatas

   The heart of the Bible lies in the "mysterium majestatis et caritatas" (pg. 226), that is the mystery of majesty and love. The idea that God is both majestic and loving is one of the most perplexing statements found in Scripture. As shown in the previous posts, God is Holy and Majestic while being Loving and Gracious. These are in tension with each other. One demands Wrath while the other demands Love. Brunner says it this way: "The Biblical message contains in itself the dialectical tension between Wrath and Mercy, between the Holiness which is identical with Love, and the Holiness which, as the wrath of God, in opposition to it." (pg. 234)
  
 The last two posts have been trying to unpack this idea: God is Love and God is Wrath. It would be much easier if we could say that the Revelation of God in Jesus Christ removed this paradox, that God has given up His Wrath and now is only Love. In the last post, we tried to show that God's wrath is His Love, yet this seems unsatisfactory. It is unsatisfactory because it is not in the Biblical text. "Human thought...is always trying to evade this dialectic. It desires and demands an obvious unity." (pg. 234) 


  Before starting to think about this dialectic, we are warned by the Reformer Melanchtohon, "Mysteria divinitas rectius adoraverimus quam vestigaverimus. " (pg. 205) This means that the Mystery of The Nature of God is found through worship than through investigation. Thus, let us continue on not in attitude of intellectual curiosity, but as worshipers of God.

   "God, as the Lord, wills to rule over us. Therefore He wills to put an end to our rebellion, to sin" (pg. 
218) This is the Holiness of God. Yet, this ending of our rebellion is not accomplished by The Law of the Old Covenant. The Old Covenant, by revealing a Holy God,  "simply brings sin to a head, without...overcoming it." (pg. 218) If God only was Holy, He would leaves us here. For "through sin we are in isolation, due to the fact that we are separated from God by His wrath." (pg. 219)  If God was only Holy, we would not be able to approach Him, and would be left to our self-deception and blindness to Truth. We are in a condition of loss and accursedness. We are left in a state of meaninglessness, where "the day of one's death is better than the day of one's birth" (Ecclesiastes 7:1, NASB)


  "God, who is Love, wills to give Himself to us - that is, He wills to give us this love, which is Himself." (pg. 218) The Holy God, stoops-down, and becomes Immanuel, God-with -us. It is only by revealing and veiling Himself as Jesus Christ that the gulf between sinners and the Holy God can be bridged. Only when God kills God on a cross can God's Holiness and God's Love exist in unity. The Holy God gave Himself to us, not just be with us, but to fulfill both the Love and Wrath of God. This is the Divine Mystery, we will never understand it. There is no room in the Church for a "mysterium logicum" but only room for the "mysterium majestatis et caritatis".

The Veiled God

   The Naked and Veiled God are "the characteristic and decisive element(s) in the Christian Idea of God. Thus, in this paradoxical dualism of Holiness and Love, God reveals His name to us; it is thus that He wills to be known and worshipped [sic]. It is thus that He reveals Himself simply and solely, in the Bible, in Jesus Christ."(pg. 183) God is not knowable as God as the Deus Nudus, the Naked God. In order to be approached, God must approach us first. He does this by a Divine Kenosis, a self-emptying that takes place in the Person of Jesus Christ, according to Brunner.

  If, what we established in the previous post is correct, God is too Majestic to be entered into relationship with unless He veils Himself. He veils Himself as "the incarnation of the Word in Jesus Christ...whose whole revelation is one sole movement of gracious condescension to man, an act of saving Mercy." (pg. 184) It is not until God reveals Himself by veiling Himself that we can be approached by Him or can approach Him. This veiling is done at various points during the Old Testament, but the full self-emptying and condescension is not accomplished until the Incarnation. If God had not veiled Himself, we could not cry "Abba, Father". We could only cry the cry of Isaiah, "Woe is me, for I am ruined! Because I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of Hosts." (Isaiah 6:5)


   It is only after we have been cleansed that we can even bear the voice of the Deus Nudus. Yet, when God becomes the Deus Velatus, we can emulate the Deus Incarnatus and cry "Abba, Father!" (Mark 14:36) It is only then can we "express the most daring statement that has ever been made in human language: God is Love." (pg. 184-185) What makes this the most daring statement is that it is new in the world. "It is proper to say that man can, and indeed must God, yet it is equally clear that to introduce the statement "God is Love" in their systems of thought (Platonism, Aristotelianism, or Neo-Platonism) would be completely nonsensical." (pg. 183) In the history of thought, only Christianity can get away with saying that God is love. For these philosophical systems can only think in terms of Eros or Erotic love and not Agape, Self-giving Love.

  "The Love of God, the Agape of the New Testament, is quite different" (pg. 186) from Eros. "Eros is the desire for value, and the will appropriate such value" (pg. 186) while Agape "does not seek value, but it creates value or gives value; it does not desire to get but to give; it is not 'attracted' by some lovable quality, but it is poured out on those who are worthless and degraded." (pg. 186) Erotic love is trying to be valued, while Agape creates it. This is a striking difference.

  Now, if God remained the Deus Nudus, all we could do is desire for Him to value us, to call us worthy. The only Persons worthy to enter relationship with the Deus Nudus is the Trinity. Quoting Luther, Brunner states that "there is at all times enmity between man and God, and they cannot be friends and agree with one another' and where the two persons come into conflict with each another, there must man be broken to pieces, for he cannot stand against God." (pg. 170) Thus, man is excluded from relationship with the Deus Nudus.

  However, the Deus Nudus only exercises the "left hand of God", the non-will of God. The Left Hand is the Hand of Holiness that must be set against humanity. It is not part of God's nature to be wrathful, but because he "takes Himself, His Love, infinitely seriously, and in so doing also takes man infinitely seriously, He cannot do otherwise than be angry, although 'really' He is only Love." (pg. 170)


  The "right hand of God", the will of God is His Love. In His Love, He veils Himself, covers Himself in Love. Yet, "This concealing is...not a real hiding of God's Face, but it is indeed the real unveiling."(pg. 172) This covering in Love is not "to impart...'something', but his very Self, for this Love is self-surrender, self-giving to the other, to whom love is directed." (pg. 186-187) 


 The left and right hand of God is the paradox we spoke of at the beginning. For "there is a sharp and essential contrast; for Holiness creates distance, but love creates communion. Holiness erects barriers, love breaks through them."(pg. 188) Thus, we must ask, how can we hold to both the complete Holiness of God and the Love of God?

  We need to understand and recognize that without God being Holy, God could not love. "Only the God who in Himself possesses all Perfection, who is perfectly self-sufficient and needs no other, thus only the God who is absolute Lord, sovereign personality, can love in freedom, can love unfathomably. One who needs another loves the other with Eros, not with Agape." (pg. 189) If God was not Holy, His love would be seeking validation, instead of being able to validate.

   Secondly, "God's Holy will is fulfilled in the creature as perfect communion with Him, the Holy One, and this is His Love." (pg. 190) Only when His Holy Will is completed and all resistance is broken down can His love stream back to Him from the hearts of the saints. If we are not wholly united with this Holy Will and if we are not a mirror of His Holiness, God would not have any glory.

  Thus, God's Glory does not stem from His non-will, His Wrath, but from His will, His Love. "love completes Holiness and is only fully Love in the fulfillment of Holiness." (pg. 190) Without Holiness, there would not be Love. Conversely, if there was not Love, there would not be Holiness. They are inseparable. In the veiling of God, both Love and Holiness are one; "complete communion and salvation." (pg. 190)

  Faith is not merely crying out, begging for Mercy, but is "simply being grasped and held by the love of God in Jesus Christ.' (pg. 198-199) God is not Wrath, but is Love. When we repent, the left-hand can come together and merge with the right-hand and cradle us. "The fact that God is love" is not just a statement meant to reassure and comfort us, "but is the quintessence, the central word of the whole bible. The God of revelation is the God of Love." (pg. 199)



  I feel that it is appropriate to end with the words of Rich Mullins: "You were then my King of Glory, won't you be my Prince of Peace."

The Naked God

    One of the major heresies at work today in the church is Pelagianism. The chief error of Pelagius (http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/11604a.htm) was that he did "not regard the wrath of God, (and Pelagianism( constructs for itself such a God who is merciful" (pg. 174) Now, that is striking! The idea that God is merciful is heresy! Before telling me that I am wrong, let me explain myself (and with that, Brunner and Luther's position). The problem with the idea that God is merciful is that in today's age, we want to think of God as only merciful. That is clearly not the case if we read Scripture faithfully.

  The flip side of this heresy is to think that God is only un-merciful, that the Divine is only here to crush us and condemn us to punishment. In some churches, we stress the doctrine of Hell and torment and create a God that does not love, and only punishes. This too leaves us with an incomplete picture of God.

  What we should understand is that God is both merciful and full of wrath. The mercy of God flows from His right hand, while the wrath of God flows from his left. This is an important distinction made by Martin Luther and carried on by Brunner and Barth. There are two sides (at least!) to God and His will.

  Luther explained this by positing that God is both Deus Absconditus and Deus Revalatus. God is both Hidden and Revealed to us simultaneously. God is a mystery to us, and is truly the mysterium tremendum", the Tremendous Mystery that we cannot fathom and cannot know, if it were not for the second part, which is that God reveals Himself to us. This means, that on one side, God is separate from us, apart from us, and not with us.God is, in a word, Holy.

  If it were not for the fact that He is a God who Reveals, we would know nothing about Him. He would be reduced down to a concept that would not be necessary to know about. He would become Aristotle's Unmoved Mover or First Cause, that which started the world, and absconded.

 However, we cannot approach such a God that is Holy if He did not veil Himself. This leads us to Luther's second distinction, that God is both Deus Nudus and Deus Velatus. "The Deus nudus is that naked Majesty, the of whom is intolerable for the sinful creature." (pg. 171) Brunner goes on talking about 'the naked God', saying that "it is impossible that human weakness should grasp and be able to bear the High Majesty of God" (pg. 172) With this, we should think of Moses on the mount when God passes by, unveiled, revealing only his back, lest Moses die. It is not that we cannot intellectually comprehend the naked God, but that we cannot even see the full majesty, lest we die. "Hence, "he who does not wish to fall on this stone and be broken to pieces, let him beware, and not deal with God 'nakedly' apart from His Word and His promise" (pg. 172)

  The Naked God refers "to God apart from Christ" (pg. 172), apart from His revelation. It is then the work of the Naked God, of His Left Hand to pour out judgment and wrath on humanity. "Sin", not God's Will or Nature, "the resistance of man, is the reason why God must do this 'strange work' (Opus alienum), why He must show Himself and express Himself as the wrathful God." (pg. 169) It is not because God is wrathful that he punishes. It is because God is Holy and man resists to be Holy that God pours out wrath and anger. "Sin obliges Him 'to turn his back on man', to do His work 'on the left hand', instead of His work of grace 'on the right hand." (pg. 169) The wrath of God "attains its end, in the repentance and faith of the sinner, it is in very deed the most characteristic work of the Grace of God." (pg. 169) Brunner, through Luther, here is making a claim that needs to be listened to. The wrath of God is not punishment for punishment sake, but punishment as chastisement. It is not wrath, it is grace.

  God, due to His Grace, becomes the veiled, through His Revelation (that is to say, through Christ), so that He can become known to us. He becomes known to us "not as the unveiled naked Majesty, but only in this veiled form as Love." (pg. 172) God, in His Nature, is Love, not wrath. Brunner here quotes Luther, who says "His Heart and Thoughts are full of love and nothing else." (Pg. 171)


   We must then be guarded when talking about God being a God of love. For love "does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth" (1 Corinthians 13:6, NASB). Love only exists where Truth and Righteousness exist. "In Jesus Christ alone, God makes Himself known as He really is. In Him God shows Himself to us as 'an abyss of eternal love'. The revelation and the communication of this love, the work of free grace is 'God's proper work, His opus proprium." (Pg. 168-169)

  Thus, it is not that God is wrathful or merciful. It is that God is loving. Maybe it is right to say that in the end, Love wins.

Don't Talk to Strangers

    "Don't talk to strangers, 'cause they're only there to do you harm" so starts the song Don't Talk to Strangers by Dio. Oddly enough, I think Ronnie James Dio is on to something. For there is something inherently dangerous about talking to strangers. Actually, there is something dangerous about talking to anyone. As soon as you do, you invite them into your world, and sometimes, they can become your world. Dio continues, singing, "Don't talk to strangers, they're only there to make you sad." When we reveal ourselves, we make ourselves vulnerable, and there is always a chance of harm, both for the other and for you.

   "The communication of a name is the disclosure of one's self to the other, and thus the establishment - or at least the beginning - of a personal relation and communion." (Pg. 123) Here, Emil Brunner seems to be in agreement with Dio, or vice versa. When we reveal ourselves to another, we enter into a communion and relation with them, and we can never be sure if this is a safe call\invitation. Even by merely stating our names, we have possibly said too much. "We human beings have proper names, by which we present ourselves to each other as something that cannot be expressed in general terms." (pg. 123) By you knowing that my name is Daniel Jesse, you know something about me, something more than if you knew I was 5'10, 260lbs, and have curly blonde hair and a beard. For the first reveals my being, who am I, where the latter reveals facts about me. The former is who I am, the latter is what I am. There is a big difference here. The former is something which cannot be defined, and the latter is the definition.

   Something more is going on here. There are many out there that fit the description of my height and weight, even my hair color and the fact that I have a beard. Knowing these things about me may say something about me, but they do not invite you into a relationship with me. My name, however, invites you to figure out the u mystery of who this "Daniel Jesse" is. When I give my name, I give myself to be known. "When one gives oneself to be known, one gives oneself away." (pg. 123) To know my name is a gift. I have given a part of myself away to you. You then have a certain power over me, to call me, to engage me, to understand me. This is the power of the name.

   When asked by someone what are name is, we sometimes exercise the power to withhold from them what our names are. As a college professor, I am not Daniel Jesse to them. I give them another name, another entity to create communion and relation with. I keep them at bay, so I do not feel obligated towards them. By telling them to call by my title, and not my given name, I take a step back from them, and erect myself above them.

  Thankfully, God does not reveal Himself to us as only a title or a rank. He reveals Himself to us as Yahweh and as Jesus. There is more given to us then a title could ever give. By telling us His name, He invites us into communion and relation with Him, and gives part of Himself to us. "He reveals Himself as the Lord. "I am the Lord, thy God."...He addresses us as One who is Himself, and this address which begins with "I" is in itself the revelation." (pg.  137) Brunner is stating that it is not in the title of Lord that God reveals the fullness of Himself to us. The fullness of revelation is in the calling Himself an I, a person to have relationship with. It is paramount that God does not reveal Himself to be an "It" but as a "Thou" (For more one the It-Thou relationship see Martin Buber's I And Thou). "This implies that God is Subject: addressing us, making Himself known to us." (pg. 139) "He is not an Ens, a "Substance", like the Godhead of metaphysical speculation; He is not an object of thought but the Subject who as I addresses us as "thou". God is the Personality who speaks, acts, disclosing to us Himself and His will." (pg. 139) 


  Now, this raises a question: By speaking of God as a Person, as having a Personality, are we not engaging in anthropomorphic language? Brunner's radical answer to this is an emphatic No! If we were able to put God into our categories, He would not be God. He would be an idol. The question, according to Brunner is wrong. "The question is not whether God is personality, but whether man is. It is not the personal being of God which is "anthropomorphic", but, conversely, the personal being of man is a "theomorphism." God alone is truly Person, man is only person in a symbolic way, as a reflection of God, as the Imago Dei."(Pg. 140)


  Brunner, in the above passage is saying that we are only persons because God has deemed us worthy to enter into personhood with Him. God invites us to commune with Him in a way that no human can. Although some have tried, we cannot give or remove personhood. That designation is not ours, it is a gift of God. What we do with this gift is up to us. We can invite others to share in the communion of God, or we can follow Dio's advice, and not talk to strangers.

The End of Dogmatics

       Dogmatics is interpretation. In fact, everything is interpretation. There is no way to avoid interpretation in this world. We may fool ourselves by saying that we are translating the words spoken to us, but we never truly hear the words as they are spoken. In fact, according Soren Kierkegaard, as soon as we try to speak our words, we enter into interpretation which gets rid of the truth that we are trying to express. Even when approaching doctrine, we must and only can interpret.

   Brunner states that "Dogmatics is interpretation."(pg. 70)  There is no way to understand the message of Holy Scripture in it's pure form. In fact, there is no pure form of Holy Scripture. What Brunner means by this is that Holy Scripture was revealed in a particular time, at a particular place, to a particular person. When that person wrote the words that were later canonized, the message had been changed. The testimony of the apostles reflects their human character. And their human character "means that it is coloured by the frailty and imperfection of all that is human." (pg. 34) Now, we wonder if our task as faithful readers of Scripture should try to peel away the layers of frailty and imperfection.

  The answer to this is a triumphant No! in the vein of Barth's response to Brunner. (see Natural Theology: Comprising "Nature and Grace" by Professor Dr. Emil Brunner and the Reply "No!" by Dr. Karl Barth) Brunner continues to say "ideas which our forefathers in the Faith used to express the truth we hold in common, must be freshly translated by us, and be replaced by others, in order to make clear what they meant." (pg. 70) He follows this assertion by asking what sense does it make in this day and age to speak of the "Three Persons of the Trinity"? When we speak in this way, the doctrine of the Trinity laid out in Scripture and by the early church "sounds really heterodox and polytheistic." (pg. 70) For Brunner, when we do not interpret the doctrines of the church in a contemporary way, we lose our understanding of the ideas being expressed, and therefore can jettison the ideas themselves.

   Now, this might sound like we are trying to make the Gospel relevant for our age. That is not the case! In fact, we are trying to make our age relevant to the Gospel. What is at stake is not whether or not the Gospel is relevant, but whether or not we understand it. For "What is so often offered to us as 'genuinely Biblical theology (that is, theology without translation) is the very opposite; it is a stale and lifeless theology, which is unable to make the Gospel intelligible in the language of the day." (pg. 71) According to Brunner, the world and words of Scripture become something historical, and artifact to be studied and examined, which takes the life away from it. More strikingly, "to give up translation means to abandon the effort to make the message our own." (Pg. 71) Simply stated, until we put the Scriptures and dogmas in our own words, they are someone else's words that have little connection to us.

    Yet, we have to be careful as we go about translating. The danger in translation, any translation, is that we might lose or even betray the central concern and message. Thus, we need to give a "faithful" rendering. We, as part of a faith community, need to be careful how we read the text and how we apply it to our lives and thoughts.  "The ideas which serve the process of appropriation must remain subordinate to the subject which is the writer's main concern. When these ideas become independent, when they are erected into a system, into a form or a mould, into which the content of the Christian message is to be poured, there the Gospel has been violated." (Pg. 71-72) In short, when we try to make the Gospel say what we think it should say so that it fits our ideas and our personal preferences, we have left the realm of translation and have entered the world of the author. Even though this idea or personal preference can be "biblical", we have lost the essence of what is Biblical.

      This thought can signal the end of trying to have a dogmatic, over-arching system. Brunner says again, "Wherever dogmatics becomes a system, or is systematically dominated by a fundamental idea then already there has been a fatal declension from the attitude of the faithful translator. The very thing that makes such an impression, and attracts people with good brains: rigid unity of thought, in dogmatics is the infallible sign of error. Revelation cannot be summed up in a system." (pg. 72)


   I see this latching onto a fundamentally biblical idea present in the Church today, trying to read everything into a neat formula (perhaps catch-phrase?). The major formula or catch-phrase in the Reformed world that is steadly making it's way through non-Reformed churches is the meta-narrative of Creation, Fall, Redemption. Now, I do not question that this is biblical, though I wonder, through Beginnings: Ancient Christian Readings of the Biblical Creation Narratives, if we can separate these ideas out. And I understand why Al Wolters put this forth in Creation Regained: Biblical Basics for a Reformational Worldview. Yet, I think we have to ask ourselves, due to Brunner's posthumous prompting, are we using it as a mould? What else are we using in our churches today in this manner?

  To Brunner the last word, "faith means the destruction of human self-will, so also is it the destruction of human systesm. Dogmatics as a system, even when it intends to be a system of revelation, is the disuised dominion of the rational element over faith" (pg. 72) 

Dogmatic Problematics

Today, I sat down and started to read Dogmatics: Volume I - Christian Doctrine of God (Library of Theological Translations) (v. 1) by Emil Brunner to officially start my season of Lent. Now, the mere fact that I am reading such a work for Lent presents a problem. For most Western Christians, Lent is a time of spiritual renewal and they spend their time reading books Show Me the Way: Daily Lenten Readings by Henri Nouwen or Celebration of Discipline: The Path to Spiritual Growth by Richard Foster. Now, I have no problem with devotional works, and find them helpful on my journey. However, as an academic, I have a hard time feeling connected to the spiritual world that these authors find themselves in. I am, though, comfortable in the realm of academic theology, so I choose to stay there this year. (Maybe next year I will engage in an academic Lent.)

     Now, I find myself with a dilemma, and that is how to avoid merely intellectualizing the faith as it is presented by Dr. Brunner. A friend asked me how I would be avoiding this problem, as in the West, you do not read with your heart, but with your mind. I replied curtly that I reject the division of heart and mind, but honestly, I do not. It is easy when learning an idea to only learn it for the sake of learning of it, and not for the sake of it having an impact on you. This is a relatively new idea, as pre-Enlightenment thinkers would not understand the point of knowledge qua knowledge. In fact, the Greeks (excluding the Sophists) prided themselves as being students and lovers of wisdom and not of knowledge. This seeking after wisdom changed when Descartes uttered his famous cogito. In it, he states, "Ego sum res cogitans, id est dubitans, affirmans, negans, pauca intelligens, multa ignorans, volens, nolens, imaginans quoque sentiens." (Quoted in Jean-Luc Marion's The Erotic Phenomenon, pg. 6) All the activities he lists (thinking, doubting, willing, non-willing, imagining, feeling) is done by the mind. Post-Cartesian Enlightenment, there is no longer a reason to apply thought, the purpose of thought is found in and of itself.

    Regrettably , I am stuck in the Cartesian tradition, even though I am trying leave. Even sadder, a clean break is not possible, so I need to face this problematic head on. Thankfully, Dr. Brunner is on my side, writing that "this kind of academic or intellectual knowledge or research (is) only possible within the community of believers."(Brunner,pg. 5) Thus, I am not located as an isolated mind like Descartes presupposes, but I start out in a place, an unique place, and that place is the Church, both local and universal. I am not alone in this project: I have the church surrounding me and informing me, asking and answering questions while I read. Due to this, I have an obligation not only to myself but to the church to not keep this knowledge for myself. Actually, I do not have an obligation. I have something stronger than that, and that is a covenant relationship with the church.

    Brunner starts his dogmatics out with an outline of his project, and how he is not trying to reduce the doctrine of the church down to a dead letter. He is trying to keep it as a living word, as a testimony to The Living Word. For, "The Christian message is, first of all, narrative, not doctrine." (pg. 35) Thus, to start with doctrine is to the lose the story and tradition that courses through it. It is then my hope to never let this out of my sight, that I am not studying a logical syllogism that floats abstractly in the realm of pure idea, but I am meditating on a narrative that I am a part of. On top of this, I have to read the text as not only an invitation to the world of Reformed theology (at least Brunner's understanding of Reformed Theology). I have to read the text as an invitation to participate in the life of Christ and his church. Brunner states that "no longer are we content to 'believe it', but our one concern is to come to Him, to trust Him, to be united to Him, to surrender to Him. Revelation and faith now mean a personal encounter, personal communion." (pg. 26) The Triune God revealed in Holy Scripture does not allow us to only think about and affirm Himself. When we are doing this, we are participating in idolatry instead of worshiping.

This is how I am trying to solve the problem of reading a dogmatic text for Lent. For "Doctrine and teaching (The German word Lehre means both teaching and doctrine) continually passes into worship, thanksgiving and praise." (pg. 39) For in the end, if I read Brunner's dogmatics correctly, I cannot make it a mere intellectual exercise. Not only would I be doing violence against the text by reading it as such, I would be doing violence against myself, and worst of all, violence against the church.

Homo Viator

         Humanity, is on the way, always moving towards something. At least, we should be. The classic theological concept for this is "Homo Viator", or Man on the Way. For life is a journey, an adventure that we are always a part of. We do not choose to be on the way, it is our existential situation. We are not at home, we are are on the way home.

       We long to be at home, in a place of comfort, yet we are not. For there is "an inherent 'not-yet' of finite being" (Josef Pieper, Faith, Hope, Love, pg. 93) As finite beings, we are cursed and blessed with statu viatoris, or the status of being on the way. The blessing of this is that we are not made to be stagnant, but to always be on the way to finding rest. This is the inherent curse also. We feel as we are called to suffer, to not be at peace, instead of to be at home and prosper. According to the German theologian Jurgen Moltmann, (in his book, Theology of Hope (SCM classics)) we are kept in "that unreolved openness to the world" which will only be resolved when the "God that promises fulfills His promises."
  
     This means that not only are we journeying, but we are waiting. We cannot create the rest and the home that we long for. We need to keep moving, but we are not the ones that create the end (τέλοϛ). However, we often ignore this, and indulge in Presumptio, the idea that we can create the end, and call where we are, and take refuge in our ideals, in what we think is rest. Due to the fact we live in the 'not-yet' of fulfillment, we try to make fulfillment happen through our actions. By positing this false fulfillment, we pervert what we really want, what it really means to be at rest, and give into a watered down version of life.

       To put it another way, Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon talk about life as an adventure in their book, Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony. According to them, "Jesus invited ordinary people to come out and be part of an adventure, a journey that kept surprising them at every turn in the road." (Pg. 49) They continue that "The church exists today as resident aliens, an adventurous colony in a society of unbelief. As a society of unbelief, Western culture is devoid of a sense of journey, of adventure, because it lacks belief in much more than the cultivation of an ever-shrinking horizon of self-preservation and self-expression." (Pg. 49) As a member of the Church, I must confess that I have lost the sense of journey and adventure that they speak of. I feel at times that my journey has ended. I have read the story of Scripture, and I intellectually comprehend the gist, thus, why go further? Yet, that is not the point of Scripture, to just have a basic outline of life. (The motif of Creation, Fall, Redemption is a good heuristic tool, yet I find myself being satisfied with this simple formula.) Hauerwas and Willimon continue that "The Bible is fundamentally a story of a people's journey with God. Scripture is an account of human existence as told by God. In scripture, we see that God is taking the disconnected elements of our lives and pulling them together into a coherent story that means something" (pg. 53), not just for the individual, but for the community.

      What I am trying to do through this blog is invite you on a journey with me through works of philosophy and theology that keep us on the way, in statu viatoris. For we do not journey alone, and we need faithful companions with us to keep us moving and to help us resist becoming complacent in this life.  I invite you to comment on the posts, to email me, to talk to me, to correct me as I make my journey. I do not have the answers, nor do you, yet together we can move towards them. My Lenten project is not just for self-betterment, but for the betterment of the community, of the Church. Please join me in trying to understand the coherent story of Scripture and how my life fits into it. It is false to think that Scripture should fit into my life, and I hope to avoid this error with your help.

Lent as a Journey

   As Lent approaches, I find myself wondering where I am inside of the Christian tradition. I want to say that I have made the move from Baptist to Reformed, but this is not true. I am still trying to figure out how I am shaped by the theology of my childhood (Baptist), and how that has changed through my time in college and graduate school (Reformed). It would be false to say that I have left behind my roots, as they are always with me. I am always inside of the hermeneutical circle created in my youth. What I mean by this is that what I grew up believing will always continue to influence how I read the world around me, and I can never, nor should I ever want to, get rid of this influence.(Hans-Georg Gadamer makes this point in Truth and Method (Continuum Impacts))
   
     Thus, it is my goal during the Lenten season (Ash Wednesday-Holy Saturday) to try to explore where I am in the Christian Tradition. I started this discipline two years ago after reading an article by Merold Westphal, entitled Atheism for Lent (http://theotherjournal.com/2008/02/20/atheism-for-lent/). In this short article, which is a summary of his book, Suspicion and Faith: The Religious Uses of Modern Atheism[Image]. In the article, and the book, Westphal encourages Christians to take the time of Lent to explore our fundamental beliefs through the philosophers of suspicion (Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx) in order to question why we believe what we believe. This exercise was challenging, as I was implicitly taught not to question my beliefs in such a fashion. It was also challenging, as I have been a Christian for what seems all my life, being born into a Christian family, a Christian church, and by extension, a Christian tradition. What I learned from this spiritual exercise is that we need to be always reforming, always questioning what we belief and why. It was an attempt to take the charge given by St. Peter, " always being ready to make a defense to everyone who asks you to give an account for the hope that is in you" (1 Peter 3:15, NASB). By taking seriously the charges and questions of Nietzsche, Freud and Marx, I found that I was better prepared to not only defend the hope inside of me, but I re-discovered the hope given to me by the Triune God.

       Continuing on this theme, the next Lenten season, I explored the works of Paul Van Buren, Thomas JJ Altizer, William Hamilton and Gabriel Vahanian. Collectively, these authors founded the Death of God theological movement. This movement was brought to the attention of the American public in the October 1965 issue of Time Magazine that chronicled it. (http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,941410,00.html)  By reading these thinkers on what it would mean if we have replaced God, I searched my life to see if what I held about God was idolatrous, and to see if I was contributing to the removal of God in my life and the life of others.

   This year, I am taking a different approach to the same problem that I started two years ago. (Understanding our faith is not a mere Lenten project, but an on-going journey) I am going to read Emil Brunner's Dogmatics. I am reading this to help me understand not just the Reformed faith, but the Faith. As a philosopher, by training and vocation, it is easy to let theological ideas remain under-defined while trying to shore up my philosophical acumen. Thus, for this Lenten season, I am attempting to de-compartmentalize my mind and heart.

   I am trying then, to embark on a journey towards being a more faithful follower of God: The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. This is not a mere intellectual journey that I am embarking on. I am approaching the subject academically, yet, I will also be using my reading as devotions, to be able to not just think through complex doctrines, but to meditate on how to live them out.